Bees: 5 Things You Didn't Know

3- Bees kill more people than alligators and sharks combined

Another thing you didn't know about bees is that Jaws has nothing on them.

Africanized honeybees kill as many as three people a year (combined, sharks and alligators can't muster the bloodlust to kill even one person per year, on average), and they do it with an admirable amount of determination. They're willing to pursue you for more than a quarter mile (on the History Channel show MonsterQuest they were shown to be good for double that distance) and they're too smart for commonsense strategies like hiding in water, since they're happy to wait for you to come up for air.

Unfortunately, to the naked, terrified eye, it's impossible to tell the difference between regular honeybees and Africanized honeybees.

4- Bee flight was long believed to be aerodynamically impossible

Calling them "some of the most exotic flight mechanisms that are available to insects," in 2005 researchers at Cal Tech finally solved the mystery of bee flight. For decades it was a problem scientists could not solve. In 1934, esteemed French entomologist August Magnan wrote in Le vol des insectes that, with the help of his lab assistant, he had deduced that bee flight contradicted the principles of aerodynamics and should, therefore, be impossible.

Using high-speed photography, Cal Tech researchers determined that bees beat their wings over a very small arc, but they do it at a phenomenal clip for insects as big as they are: about 230 beats per second. This might help explain why honey bees have been clocked at speeds of up to 15 miles per hour.

5- Bees practice a form of sexual cannibalism

The last thing you didn't know about bees will make you glad you aren't one of them.

When male bees, called drones, mate with a queen bee, the exchange for the male is the worst erotically based rip off you can imagine, because not only is the encounter brief, but it's also a literal rip off: the drone's endophallus (sex organ) is literally ripped off of him and left inside her. The poor drone has had sex for the first and last time in his life. His sacrifice has an evolutionary point; the idea is to inseminate the queen and, by leaving his junk behind, prevent any other guys from doing the same. Unfortunately, it doesn't work, as several more drones will follow, each merely removing the business of the one before him.

The act of ditching your genitals in the female to obstruct competition is a form of sexual cannibalism that is also common among species of spiders.

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